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agreed (and they know it) - this is probably their 18-month holding pattern while the Israel team gets the power out of Iris. Not having a market position until then is a worse option for them. Not paying a video royalty is obviously better for cost/profitability and developers.

I like Krebs, so DO NOT put him in a position where he has to think about protecting your identity. For the love of all that is holy, boot Tails on a junker laptop at a cafe you never go to and use a throw-away mail account or pastebin it and leave a comment.

Or just walk away. You have no duty to put your life on the line here - everybody who supports the system that will throw you to the lions for being a good guy will suffer for it in kind. You're not obligated to be their saviour. Sucks, but play the shitty hand you're dealt - don't bet all your money wishing you didn't just have a pair of threes.

Dude, you're fourteen years behind the news. The technique is not to get you on the "refusing NSA" charge, but any of the other countless criminal acts you commit every day. This is the primary purpose of a hyper-criminalized environment - so that everybody can be easily bent to the whim of the power structure. See also: charge stacking and the de-facto abolishment of the Sixth Amendment through the plea-bargain process (or, if you're a corporation, the no-plea deal for really efficient fascism.

Seagate is correct. Putting a hash on the website doesn't improve security at all because anyone who can change the download can also change the web page containing the hash.... A company like Seagate doesn't rely on volunteers at universities to distribute their binaries so the technique is pointless.

There are many possible attacks. A hash on a website is not invulnerable to a rogue employee at Seagate (or one "just following orders").

A hash protects against a rouge insertion at the endpoint. Like if your PC is compromised by an attacker and then you pull the hard drive and [assuming there's a way to get a hash from SMART/ATAPI) you can compare the hash of the firmware that the drive is running to the list of published firmwares at the vendor's site. If the attackers are only modifying a small subset of drives, this works fine - they can't also intercept the check to the vendor's site - not unless they've broken TLS and/or have malware on every possible machine.

A tool to verify the firmware is poetically impossible to write. What code on the drive would provide the firmware in response to a tool query? Oh right..... the firmware itself.

Well, today you can pull the image from JTAG, or so the experts have said (you can verify the firmware directly from memory with a hash if you have moderate funding). There's all sorts of talk about how ATAPI is write-only for firmware because the vendors don't want their competition to get their code and decompile it. This appears to be nonsense, as any other drive vendor already has the debug tools to pull such things from memory, and extracting it from an update isn't that hard - if a 16K DOS update utility can extract it, so can a multi-billion dollar R&D company.

To make it work you need an unflashable boot loader that acts as a root of trust and was designed to do this from the start. But such a thing is basically pointless unless you're trying to detect firmware reflashing malware and that's something that only cropped up as a threat very recently. So I doubt any hard disk has it.

They most certainly do not. So, here we are at today and need a way forward. There are a few ways forward, a fistful of crypto protocols to choose from to ensure future usefulness of hard drives for security applications, and INCITS/SATA-IO ought to be having emergency meetings _right now_ because this (NSA/GCHQ) is a major threat to the industry. The vendors may need to move operations outside of five-eyes to remain commercially viable.

As far as I know, Systemd has no capacity to think and therefore has no opinion on net neutrality.

Three days ago the Systemd-UpdateAgainstYourWillD automatically installed SystemD-AiD, which is a requirement to even boot the kernel because it was deemed no human being ever has or ever could be capable of the overwhelming task of "run some programs", which of course includes programs written by humans.

Two days ago there were promises SystemD-AiD would also gain enough intelligence to read corrupted syslogs, while insulting your petty human intelligence via way of SystemD-FortuneD, and injecting them into all outbound emails sent from your username via SystemD-SpammerD.It was also rumored to soon be capable of washing your dishes, since no init system wants to start dirty programs or use plastic fork()'s.

Yesterday they canceled the dish washing patch based mainly on a usenet poll where "fuck systemd!!!" was interpreted by a similar AI as voting against the feature, thus canceling the patch due to overwhelming demand.

Do some traffic analysis on your target's porn habits at the ISP, leave a compromised disc about his favorite kink in a bag on the ground near where he parks his car, and use his "connected" player to zero-day the other equipment on his LAN, installing the APT without even needing to pretend about premesis warrants or anything.

I will preface this by saying "this is really true" because you probably would otherwise read it as a nonsense, sarcastic, or glib comment.

I heard a conversation the other day about some of the terrible new buildings at the nearby university. A very senior administrator said (paraphrased), "you need to hire a hot architect and pay him 20% of the project price to come up with some really shocking architecture, to prove to prospective students that the school is still relevant."

I think he was talking mostly about the atrocity that they added to the Medical School, which looks suspiciously like the post-accident Chernobyl reactor. The "architecture" part of the project probably added $20M over making it look like a classical higher-ed building. I believe this administrator had final sign-off on such an expense.

It's not, if you're speaking about the economic term. A 'public good', to an economist, is something that cannot be provided by the private market (a "market failure") and therefore must fall to a government to provide. Education is one where the private market excels in comparison to the public provision, which would be a counter-example.

And how should the government do that? With the tax income that these companies managed to avoid paying? Cool story bro.

The government should take money from the poor and funnel it into the coffers of these corporations. Did you miss the part where government is for the privatization of gains and the socialization of losses?